ON Tuesday, two American men who are in their 70s — the incumbent Donald Trump, who is 74, and Joe Biden, who will be turning 78 on November 20 — will be slugging it out to land what we are told is the top job in the world.
It is literally a battle of septuagenarians.
If Biden wins the election, he would be 86-years-old by the time he completes his second term.
You might be tempted to think the United States of America doesn’t have any youths, yet, if we are to take a loose definition of the word youth, there are more than 170 million people who are below 40.
This translates to 51,8 percent, or more than half of the population.
Remember, the incumbent has intimated he might not readily concede if he loses the election as he believes this can only be possible if the election is rigged.
Also, since June, when it became apparent that he would be facing Biden at the polls, Trump has been pushing the Attorney-General to investigate the Bidens for alleged corruption in their dealings in Ukraine.
He has also systematically attacked the media that is critical of him.
This is just but a handful among a laundry list of supposed peculiarities around this year’s elections in what we are told is the world’s best model democracy.
Yeah, right!
Had all this been happening somewhere in Africa, Trump would have been invariably described as yet another “despotic” and “brutal” old man intent on “clinging” onto power by whatever means possible and imaginable, and at whatever cost.
Yet America is the world’s biggest economy.
But ageism is not an oddity in America alone.
In Japan — the world’s third-largest economy, 71-year-old Yoshihide Suga took over the reins after ex-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe resigned in August.
Some thought the fresh-faced 39-year-old Environment minister Shinjiro Koizumi — son to former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi — would have been an ideal candidate, but the leadership of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, however, considered him to be too young, too green and too unprepared for onerous and weightier matters of the state. Kikikiki.
Proverbs 20:29 always reminds us, “The glory of the young is their strength; the grey hair of experience is the splendour of the old.”
Job 12:12 says, “Wisdom belongs to the aged, and understanding to the old.”
It also has to be remembered that when God gave Moses and Aaron the daunting task of freeing the Israelites from the tyrannical grip of the Egyptians, the duo was aged 80 and 83, respectively.
